The "War on Cops", by Heather Mac Donald.

If you were shocked with the "ambush" of police officers in Dallas
leading to the "assassination" of five of them you might find this
interview with Heather MacDonald author of  "The War on Cops"
important, perhaps even essential to understand fully what is

occurring across our country.

Mac Donald presents the depth of the problem and the failure of
government at all levels to reduce crime in the most dangerous
communities in our country.

Before reading the transcript put aside everything you heard from
the media and politicians. Digest what Ms. Mac Donald has learned
from her research that must be part of any discussion going forward.

Please pass along to others who share concerns of the treat criminal

behavior plays in our most at risk communities.

The transcript of the interview.

Host:  The war on cops has now come to Dallas, Texas.  The war on police has come
to Dallas, Texas. Let me introduce Heather Mac Donald, who has a book out.  S
he's a scholar, Manhattan Institute, and a prolific writer.  And her most recent book is:
The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.
Not just the cops, but particularly the cops.

Her research has produced some incredible statistics, and I want you to hear it from her.
So she has graciously consented to come back and she joins us now.  Heather, thanks
for making time today.  I really appreciate it.

MAC DONALD: It's an honor talking to you twice in 24 hours.

Host: I don't want to steal your thunder, but I want to review some of the things that you
said yesterday.  I went back to the transcript of the interview.  Let me run through some
of these things before you elaborate.

You said you could end all police shootings tomorrow, both lethal and nonlethal and justified
and unjustified, and it would have a negligible effect on the astronomical rate at which blacks
die by shootings.  And then there was this:

The Justice Department under Obama came out with a report in March of 2015, a little over
a year ago, that found that black and Hispanic officers were actually far more likely to shoot 
unarmed black suspects under what's known as threat mis-perception, the false belief
that the suspect is armed.  That happens much more than with white officers, who are less
likely to engage in that type of threat misperception.

Then there was a study by the New York Police Department. The former acting director of the
National Institute of Justice found that black officers in the New York Police Department 
were 3.3 times more likely to use their guns at shooting scenes than white officers.

Officers are more hesitant about shooting armed black suspects than armed white suspects
to the point where now there's a risk that officers are hesitating so long that they may put their
own lives at risk.  The Black Lives Matter, that is all about white officers attacking blacks, is
simply not true.    Please begin...

MAC DONALD:  Well, President Obama lied to the nation last night, and he embraced the
Black Lives Matter myth that there is a racist war by white officers against black civilians in
this country.

And we see the results, there's no government agency more dedicated to the proposition
that Black Lives Matter than the police. Proactive policing has saved tens of thousands of
minority lives since the mid‑ 1990s.

And now police officers are backing off.  They've been backing off before the Dallas
assassinations under the assault of hatred that is being spewed at them on the streets.

But above all in the mainstream media by activists and by politicians from the White House
on down, they're backing off of proactive policing, and crime is going up astronomically,
as much as 90 percent in cities with large black populations. After Dallas shootings, officers
are going to be even more reluctant to engage.  And the result is going to be more carnage.

MAC DONALD:  Well, it's politics and it's also ideology.  There's an ideology that's taken hold
of universities, has taken hold of elite establishments, committed to the myth of endemic
white racism.  And you're right, there have been bad shootings, police shootings.

The Walter Scott shooting in North Charleston was very bad. Laquan McDonald shooting in
Chicago.  These were appalling incidents of police negligence and likely criminality. But those
are not representative of this nation's police forces.  They are more professional than ever
before and they are dedicated to saving black lives.

MAC DONALD:  Let's look at some of the numbers.  I know numbers are sometimes tough
over the radio, but a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are the 
results of police killings than black homicide deaths.  That is, 12 percent of all whites
and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers vs. 4 percent of all blacks,
homicide victims, are killed by police officers.

So if we're going to have an Anti‑Cop Lives Matter movement it would make more sense to
call it White and Hispanic Lives Matter.

Fact is that over 6,000 blacks die of homicide each year, more than white and Hispanic
homicide victims combined, even though blacks are 13 percent of the nation's population.

And the reason they are dying of homicide at a rate six times higher than whites and
Hispanics combined is because they commit homicide at eight times the rate higher than
whites and Hispanics combined.  That type of crime disparity means that when the police
are trying to save lives, they are in minority neighborhoods confronting people engaged
in drive‑by shootings, killing children.

In the last 72 hours in Chicago there's been about four children under the age of eight who
have been shot.  One boy shot in the back on Father's Day. A 3‑year‑old boy was shot.
He's now paralyzed for life. That's who police are trying to protect. Given the disparities
in crime rates the police cannot  help but be in minority neighborhoods where they're
confronting violent and resisting suspects and sometimes officers themselves will have to
use force to protect themselves and protect innocent bystanders.

Host:  You've just alluded to something highly politically incorrect. You've given numbers,
hard evidence, on what is called black-on-black crime.

MAC DONALD:  Rush, here's another very politically incorrect fact, and I don't want to
racialize policing, people should not.  If we're going to talk about race and policing, let's
talk about cop killings.

Over the last decade, black males made up 40 percent of all cop killers, even though they're
six percent of population.  It turns out that a police officer is 18-and-a-half times more likely 
to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is likely be killed by an officer.

Police were running towards the shooting scene in Dallas last night as they run towards
shooting scenes in inner cities on a daily basis to try and protect children.  We don't know the
names of these black children who have been killed because the Black Lives Matter activists
don't care to talk about it.

In Cleveland in September of 2015, three children under the age of five were murdered by
drive-by shootings, leading the police chief there, who happens to be black, to break down in
tears and say everybody protests when a cop is shot.

Why aren't we out here protesting when we shoot each other?  That is the big mystery of our
time. And again President Obama last night only fanned fires of hatred by putting out his
usual lies that the criminal justice system is racist.  It is not.  It responds to crime in order
to try to protect lives, not to take them.

MAC DONALD:  It is so appropriate that the Black Lives Matter movement took off on the
basis of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, which as you say, was a hoax continued
to venerate Michael Brown as a martyr to police brutality, which is also a hoax, because the
entire movement is based on a lie.

It is simply not the case that the police are disproportionately shooting black males when you
take violent crime into account.  And for President Obama to give that movement any credibility
when it is now threatening law and order itself, we'rre at risk of attacking the foundation of
civilization if this type of hatred continues.

What happened in Dallas is an extreme version of what officers experience every day. It's
why we  have seen a 17 % increase in homicides last year in the 56 largest cities.

An almost unprecedented one-year spike in homicides because officers are backing off of 
proactive policing, because I hear this from officers across the country, and I was contacted
two weeks ago by several Dallas officers who were talking about their reluctance to engage in
proactive policing, because when they get out of their cars now, and this is happening across
the country, officers in inner-city  areas  find themselves surrounded by hostile jeering crowds,
sticking cell phones right in the officer's face.

It's not a question of standing on the curb, filming an incident. It's a question of interfering with
an arrest scene, going in and refusing to obey orders.  

As a Chicago cop told me several weeks ago when I was out there, he's never seen 
such hatred directed at officers in his 20 years in policing.  He said this is an almost 
undoable  job now.

And, the lives that are being lost in this crime spike, Baltimore is now at its highest per capita
homicide rate in its history, are overwhelmingly black lives.  But if this continues we're going
to return to the situation of the 1960s and 1970s, people fleeing cities because lawlessness
was out of control.

Host:  What would you say if somebody asked you how to deal with this in the inner city or
African-American community. How would you approach them?  How would you get your
message to them?

MAC DONALD:  I would try something absolutely unique in this area which is truth.  I think
when the Black Lives Matter movement has been allowed to thrive by a deliberate ignorance
-- cultivated ignorance -- about the problem of black crime, that you cannot understand police
activity without understanding patterns of crime.  And the media has basically suppressed any
knowledge about how bad things are in inner cities. So I would start by giving the data on black
crime that explains why officers  are in inner-city neighborhoods trying to save lives.

And beyond that, I would give voice to the many people in inner-city communities that I have
spoken to over the years that adore the cops.  I would give voice to people like Mrs. Sweeper,
a cancer amputee in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, who told me, "Please, Jesus, send
more police."  The only time she felt safe to go into her building lobby and pick up her mail was
when the police were there because the place was otherwise colonized by teens trespassing,
smoking weed, and dealing drugs. There are thousands, millions --

MAC DONALD:  People still embrace the lie that makes them feel like they're victimized.
It's just extraordinary.

Host:  Let me quickly run something by you.  Attorney General Lynch, while we were talking
in the first hour, did a short press conference, and she said, she announced that the Dallas
attack will be investigated by the Department of Justice as a hate crime, which is noteworthy
because it's the first cop killing ever investigated as a hate crime.  What's your interpretation of that?

MAC DONALD:  Well, I think the Obama Administration may be having second thoughts about
the type of rhetoric that it's been using, because there's no question that it is fomenting hatred
out there. This is very dangerous stuff.  We're playing with fire, Rush.  The degree of racialized
rhetoric is going to take us back to the 1960s.

I think a lot of people are clueless about the degree of hatred of whites. You know what this
gunman said, that he hated white people and hated white cops, I hear that a lot in the inner
city.  We overlook it. We don't want to look at it head on.  If we continue with this discourse,
we're going to get more hate crimes.

I'm glad Loretta Lynch is willing to take this on honestly, because up to now it's completely
 politically biased understanding of who hates whom in this society, and the notion that our
 main problem here is white hatred of blacks is completely fiction.

We have every elite establishment tying itself into knots to try and admit as many black applicant
students or employees as possible. We have gone from a nation of segregation, explicit 
and invidious and horrible discrimination to true, willing colorblindness.

But there's still a constituency committed to division, and we better get a hold of this pretty
soon, because we could be back to levels of revolutionary violence that we were seeing
in the '60s.

Host:  How do you describe forcing federal guidelines on local police departments. They've
done it in over 30 communities now, including Ferguson, including Baltimore. Is it based on
assumption local cops don't know what they're doing or that they're not doing it the way
Obama wants them to do it and they're being, in a way, threatened with removal of federal
funds if they don't accept the consent decrees that are forthcoming here?  What's the upshot
of it in terms of actual policing?

 MAC DONALD:  The upshot is that policing takes the backseat to paper pushing. 
There's been no administration in recent history more anti-law enforcement than Obama's.
They've saddled more police departments with these crippling consent decrees and federal
monitors than any previous administration.

In keeping with Obama's constant drumbeat cops are racist and treat black and white people
in identical situations differently, these consent decrees send in a bunch of DOJ civil rights
attorneys that know nothing about policing and they get their hands on a bunch of cop
statistics, things like arrest statistics or pedestrian stops.

They compare it to population data and conclude that the police are racist because inevitably
the police will be making more pedestrian stops of blacks if they're trying to save lives
because in black communities is where 3-year-old children are getting shot to death in
drive-by shootings.

So they declare the police department racist and then make them fill out endless forms
of data. They  take officers off the beat to meet the Justice Department's paper pushing
requirements. The Obama Administration is now pushing a concept of implicit bias training
on officers across the country.

This is complete folly.  It is based on junk science that has been recently completely
disproven  by a study, an extremely sophisticated study out of the University of Washington
that found that cops actually hesitate longer to decide to shoot armed black suspects than
armed white suspects and are less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed
white suspects.

This recent study blows apart the pre-existing implicit bias junk science, and yet Obama Administration is demanding officers get sent to this training that is a waste of time because
officers want good tactical training.  They want help in making those crucial, cruel, anxiety-
producing split-second decisions of shoot/don't shoot.  And none of us would be able to live
under that pressure. They want that training, but implicit bias training, which is what gets
foisted on these departments is a complete waste of time.

Host: Sounds like Obama Administration is presuming racism is in all of these departments
and has concocted a mechanism whereby they can prove it, not really prove it, but where
they can claim it, which is the last thing we want to do.  We want to reduce racial tension.
 They're promoting it, it seems like.

MAC DONALD:  My experience is cops are totally colorblind.  Black cops, white cops, they'll
all say, "I don't care if you're green or orange, if you're acting in a way to raise suspicions
I'm going to stop and question you."  But you're absolutely right, the Obama Administration
starts with the presumption that cops are racist.

It may be too harsh to say, as Patrick Lynch of the NYPD said of de Blasio, after
assassinations of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in December of 2014 by the Black Lives
Matter movement. Lynch said de Blasio, "had blood on his hands", that was an incendiary
remark. Obama's timing was not great last night in perpetuating lies of Black Lives Matter
movement demonstrably false.

Host:  With all your studies I'm sure you've encountered the sociological aspects of this.
What role, if any, does economics in the inner city play in all of this?

MAC DONALD:  Very little. Criminologists were just chomping at the bit during the 2008
recession thinking that this would prove their favorite root causes theory of crime that is driven
by economic need.  Crime continued to drop nationally through the recession to record 
lows.  And it was dropping through the first half of 2014 when it made a rapid reverse course
and began rising  after the Michael Brown hoax in Ferguson, Missouri.

The 1960s, which was really the nadir of violent crime, we had a very strong economy.  
There  is no connection.  There's people in inner city today, the good, the clean people
who completely avoid any involvement with crime.  They have no involvement with police
because, as they tell me, I'm a good person. The cops don't stop me.

That is an excuse.  People that are engaged in these mindless drive-by shootings, kids
 in Chicago right now are responsible for this year's 50 % increase in shootings 
that are killing four-year-old children, they have smartphones. 

 I mean, the teen involvement in smartphone media and social media is a godsend to police
because they can track down all these crews.  These kids are not exactly hand-to-mouth
struggle for subsistence.  And it's not the drug war either.

This is a breakdown of the family that is leaving kids without any socialization 
and  any decent role models.  They don't have fathers.

So to say it's an economic problem is completely false and you have lots of Asian immigrants
who are at much lower income than many people on welfare and their children are virtually
not involved in crime because they have two parents at home teaching them academic
discipline and respect for authority.




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